Unpaid work subsidizes most sectors on the planet to a greater or lesser degree. I worked with housewives returning to the workplace in the 1970’s and learned a lot from that. This system isn’t going to change for us, and in order to help make the system change, we need to actively involve ourselves in knowing our own assumptions and beliefs about how things work, who could be allies in the struggle and how our own mindset contributes to our exploitation. There is a difference between contributing consciously and being coerced into it, as every roommate, local household, Amazonian tribe or arts administrator can tell you.
Exploitation isn’t about the art practice itself, or the cause or the ‘greater good’, these are the levers of a different form of capitalism. And the use of these levers to take advantage of people’s vulnerabilities – and our own collaboration in this – is what keeps this ‘exploitation’ happening.
Even healthy, respectful not for-profit organizational cultures suffer from the generalized state of human resource exploitation. We compare salaries to others in the sector and work to include living wages in our proposals and our annual budgets, to little effect. We should also be comparing these to salaries in the for-profit creative sector. This model of assuming the profit-generators are the job-creators worth subsidizing continues to dominate government and general thinking. It is entirely outdated.
Exploitation of workers who have a passion to do what they do and therefore should somehow be grateful for having any kind of job in the arts, is not unique to the arts. And a great deal of it in all sectors is due to a shift from the expectation that your employer gives you a career, to you being responsible for guiding and driving your working life through project-to-project and part-time work. This requires a very different skill set than we were given in standard schoolrooms.
Vulnerable workers are everywhere now, and it seems really odd to hear people in great surprise when their lifetime job at the mill or the plant is gone. Are they blind to the changes around us? At least we in the arts sector know there’s no magic bullet ‘job’ for us, and have learned to be resilient by necessity. Time to stop resenting it and start recognizing our many strengths from that. Like the displaced housewives of the seventies, at the same time we need to have the support of systems and services that help us see these strengths for what they are, and to develop the skills and capacity to drive, thrive and revive in an ever-changing economic and political landscape.
The issues of low pay, poor hiring and HR practices and lack of pensions/benefits and succession planning are endemic throughout the not for-profit sector. As is unpaid work that subsidizes the many organizations and causes that constantly arise as new folks decide to create yet another group. Unfortunately, exploitable workers are a renewable resource.
The ‘capital’ that the capitalists in the not for-profit sector use, is like cryptocurrency: you cannot see it or possibly even trace it, but if people make it real, it is real – the persuasive power of passion, desire, fear, need, and anything else that motivates people to want to make change, take care of themselves, get their ideas into the world, etc.
There are always people who are willing to do more for less for a chance to be ‘inside the tent’ – because they are given poor guidance counselling, or lack confidence to chart a different course, or lack critical thinking skills – with the expectation that this is the route to achieving whatever fame and fortune their artistic practice involves. It CAN be a way, but it isn’t the only way. Or even the best way.
Arts NPOs must stop differentiating themselves from other not for-profit organizations, which I think stems from a need to see us as somehow superior but using the model as a means to an end, and see common ground with others built on the same legal structure in these issues. We share so many similar types of legalities, regulations, revenue sources, power structures, human resources and history. And gain from their experience, too.
We all have to look at the economics underlying the ‘community benefit’ sector and now also the increasingly mainstream exploitation of the freelance and ‘self-employed’ individuals. As I’ve said before, this is a downloading of risk to the individual, the household level, and until we address this issue of how to support and build capacity for individuals to generate sustainable income, the problem will continue for us all.
So, in summary – this HAS turned into a dissertation, hasn’t it? – let’s look to a new understanding of economics (it walks on two legs, people), the outdated assumptions about how non for-profits work and the role they play in the greater economy, and let’s determine how to get past the old social darwinism about individuals who don’t succeed are thus are not worthy of success (or are not striving enough). At LEAST!